Discovering a home of eccentrics

Jan 15 2013

Grigory Kubatian

specially for RIR

Inside Olga Brendel's house. Source: kiaraz.org

The Village of Eccentrics is a tiny creative community – just a couple of houses, really. It is located on the other side of the Kelasur River, which flows around the edge of Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia.

In the past, this
hamlet was home to members of the Russian gentry and, later, the Soviet
intelligentsia. These days, only eccentrics dwell here.

The place earned
its name as the “Village of Eccentrics” some time ago, back when the founder of
the community – nobleman Vladimir Brendel – was still alive. In 1927, Brendel,
a biologist and a vet, was invited to stay by the leader of the republic,
Nestor Lakoba. Abkhazia’s first vet built a big house on the seashore, and then
other Russians started to settle next to him.

Brendel’s house operated on an
open door policy that welcomed all manner of creative types: the owners hosted
concerts and other events here; the man of the house played the piano and also
spent his time painting and writing poetry. The house is currently occupied by
his granddaughter, Olga Voitsekhovskaya-Brendel. She is working to keep the
memory of her talented grandfather alive, along with the memory of her mother,
a famous artist who was also named Olga.

The house’s walls
are decorated with Abkhazia’s first mosaic; the interior is filled with
paintings and large solid furniture. Olga (the younger) walks around the empty
house in scruffy slippers and a blouse, listening to an old-fashioned radio –
she says this is better than a TV. She has not been able to surpass her
relatives in terms of artistic talent due to a disability (she was born with a
withered arm), but she has carried the baton of what her grandfather started.
Having studied the work of her own mother, she became an art historian.

Olga
now works to protect the precious cultural past of this house and all its
treasures and ornaments.

“I’ve been robbed
five times. The thieves took holy icons and the 1902 three-volume sets of
Brockhaus and Euphronius. But they left the paintings alone – there are too
many of them to carry away,” said Olga.

The paintings are
arranged in a converted studio on the roof of the house. The creative house is
nestled in on a strip of land between the railway and the sea. The ocean is
only 30 meters (about 100 feet) from the garden fence. At first, the tracks
were laid on the ocean side of the house, but they were quickly washed away by
the waves. Now the rails are on the other side of the house. Luckily for the
building’s sake, trains only pass very rarely, and the railway track is
gradually being overgrown with brambles.

The other side of
the house is the home of the composer Valery Chkadua – a man of 65 years, with
a large hat and aquiline nose. He says that, as a music student in Moscow,
sculptors were queuing up to mold his profile.

Valery studied
under Shostakovich and Prokofiev. He wrote three ballets: “Ritsa” (the first in
Abkhazia’s history), “Narta,” “The Call of the Revolution,” plus another 40 or
so compositions.

In 1994, after
the war for independence and at the personal request of President Ardzinba, he
wrote Abkhazia’s national anthem, which included various folk motives. He had
to write it in winter and the house was not heated at the time, which meant
temperatures were below freezing inside the house. Valery refused to receive
royalties for his work, so the president decided to give the composer “creative”
housing as a thank you.

In part of the
house the walls are plain, painted in blue paint. A mountain bike is propped up
in the hall, and a Petrof piano stands proudly in a corner of the sitting room.
Piles of music, a bust of Tchaikovsky, an icon of St. Pantaleon and a picture
of the singing hare and wolf from the Russian cartoon “Nu, pogodi!” are all
overhead.

The composer
plays energetic chords, but the Petrof piano squeaks and clangs, painfully out
of tune.

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“During the war I
took the keyboard to pieces so marauders wouldn’t steal it. But I was never
able to put it back together properly,” Valery says calmly. Luckily, he has no
need to listen to the melody, since the sound forms right in his head.

A huge rock lies
next to the piano.

“This is a ritual
stone from the Bzybsky gorge. I dragged it home so it could give me musical
inspiration. I am also a bit of a psychic,” says Valery. He is also a writer
and a linguist and has published seven books on the origins of the worlds’
languages – expert pieces that would be hard for a layman to understand.

The incredibly
complex Abkhazian language (which is derived from Hittite) is a very
interesting subject for linguistic research. The father of 70-year-old
Margarita Orelkina spent many years studying this subject, and Margarita now
lives next door to the Brendel’s house.

The historian,
artist and linguist Valery Orelkin settled in Abkhazia in 1947. He made a
garden on the seashore and started to grow plants. To this day, the fruits of
his labor remain in the form of a jungle of greenery surrounding a small house.
There are plants with more than a thousand names: Pitsunda pine, pecan trees,
ginkgo, oleander, grapefruit and mandarins…

The place earned its name as the “Village of Eccentrics” some time ago, back when the founder of the community – nobleman Vladimir Brendel – was still alive. Source: Lori / Legion media.

His idyllic life
did not last for long. In 1949, Orelkin was arrested for political agitation.
He spent five years in labor camps before returning and painting a picture
called “The Eclipse of the Sun.” The piece depicts rows of hunched prisoners
and a cloud in front of the sun in the form of Stalin’s sideways profile.

Margarita grew up
as a dissident. She helped her father paint the figures of the prisoners,
posing with her hands behind her back. She graduated from Moscow State
University as a journalist, but was subsequently thrown out of the Writer’s
Union for reading Solzhenitsyn.

Now, having
suffered a heart attack, she tends to keep to herself. Every fortnight she goes
to town to do her shopping. She has three dogs and 14 cats. Her neighbors think
she is a little strange, but they still do not hesitate to send any homeless
animals her way.

Since spring,
Margarita has taken yet another lost soul under her wing – the 62-year-old
pensioner Alexander Polezhaev. In the past, he was something of a vagabond with
a taste for adventure; he is a former thrill-seeker who has now come to seek
out a quiet life in the fresh sea air. He spends his time catching fish and
finding mushrooms for the table, and he also helps out around the house.

Another neighbor
in the Village of Eccentrics came to these shores about a year ago. Formerly a
teacher in Krasnodar, Alexander Tyutchev (now 64) also came to Abkhazia in
search of peace and solitude. Right on the seashore by the Kelasur River he
sculpts strange figures: birds, deer and lizards. Hundreds of stones and pieces
of driftwood that wash up on the shore are transformed into these strange and
beautiful objects.

“Before there was
a rubbish dump here,” Tyutchev says. “And now everyone keeps it neat and tidy.
Women come here with their children, ask if they can sit here for a while, let
the children play.”

Over the past
year, Tyutchev has become a part of the local landscape and has certainly
carried on the baton of the eccentric Kelasur community.

Is there a future
for quirky, earthy places like this – a strange oasis in a world full of
smartphones, black Lexus cars and Adidas tracksuits imported from Chinese
sweatshops? These eccentrics are stronger than you think: they will stand their
ground, come rain or high water. And they will continue to communicate with
their muses – wherever these may be – blissfully free from worries about
keeping up the Joneses.